Via Radley Balko, it appears that former Powell aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkinson has singed what I assume to be a sworn affidavit to the effect that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were aware that innocent people had been detained at Guantanamo Bay and tried to cover it up.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

I already knew that most of the Guantanamo detainees were not captured on the battlefield and largely detained on the basis of bounties paid rather than evidence, but if Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations are true, and the Administration avoided releasing innocent people from prison for fear of political fallout, then that is simply monstrous. Maybe I was naive to think that the Administration was merely incompetent and foolhardy when it came to setting up Guantanamo–they did, after all, eventually release several hundred prisoners, so I gave them some benefit of the doubt.

Sadly, the Obama Administration isn’t much better in this respect. Replacing Gitmo with Bagram and starting a program of assassinating U.S. citizens based on secret evidence is hardly an improvement.

Comments

I don’t want to let Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld (and Steve’s response just makes me feel ill), but … one thing that came to mind during Iraq II, is that it is just bad luck to be a average person in the path of history.

I guess it’s sad that our path through Iraq was for those guys, just some random invader, stocking prisons.

Indeed, if I remember properly, they couldn’t have been innocent seeing as how only the worst of the worst were ever imprisoned at Club Gitmo, which is really more of an island resort than a prisoner anyway.

Prof. Taylor, there were hundreds of thousands of Americans detained during the Civil War for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being accused by a liar, etc. Military detention is an incident of war in which innocence has really nothing to do with it.

Steve Plunk, what you’re condoning is the same kind of attitude that kept Dreyfus on Devil’s Island long after the high command of the French army knew he was innocent. Here’s Colonel Picquart’s summary of his conversation with General Gonse after Picquart’s investigation of the relevant documents:

Gonse: “What can it matter to you whether this Jew remains at Devil’s Island or not?”
Picquart: “But he is innocent.”
Gonse: “That is an affair that can not be reopened; General Mercier and General Saussier are involved in it.”
Picquart: “Still, what would be our position if the family ever found out the real culprit?”
Gonse: “If you say nothing, nobody will ever know it.”
Picquart: “What you have just said is abominable, General. I do not know yet what course I shall take, but in any case I will not carry this secret with me to the grave.”

Picquart was a conservative and more than a little antisemitic. Yet he was honest. Do you really think he was wrong?

Indeed, initial detention may very much have everything to do with wrong place, wrong time. However, there is a difference between that unfortunate scenario and a policy of holding persons for indefinite periods sans a process of determining guilt and especially of, as the post charges, knowingly holding the innocent because it would be politically problematic to release them.

Indeed, we already knew that this was done, as the case of Uighurs showed: they were declared not to be combatants, but held for some time afterward because no place to release them could be found and it was considered politically nonviable to release them in US.

Further, the Bush administration assured us, repeatedly, that only the worst were being held at Guantanamo.

And really, your example doesn’t seem to be any kind of defense for the Bush administration’s actions–rather you seem to be saying “thems the breaks” or am I misunderstanding your point? It seems to me that in a democracy, especially one that claims to use its military might virtuously, that we should hold leaders accountable for their actions.

Prof. Taylor, I simply think “innocence” has no relevance here. It’s not because I think the person is guilty or evil either. During war people are detained in furtherance of military objectives; they should be released when that military objective would no longer be at risk from that individual’s freedom.

The Uyghurs weren’t determined to be non-combatants, they admitted to training with the Taliban/al-Qaeda at Tora Bora. They were later determined, after the situation in Afghanistan had changed and an opportunity had been given to evaluate their purported motives for being in Afghanistan, to be “no longer enemy combatants.” There was no longer military necessity to detain them, so long as they could be placed safely.

The “innocence” framework assumes a status must exist that justifies indefinite detention, which in this case might resemble a life sentence. The detention as a tool of war framework is kinetic. The first is not necessarily better from the detainees perspective.

The longer Col. Wilkerson tells his story the more dramatic that story becomes, which is the mark of somebody that is making stuff up. When he first spoke out he didn’t know how much the executives knew, now he does. All of this stuff may be true, but Wilkerson is a self serving, publicity seeking liar.